Jesse Norman: What a pleasure it is to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Gary. I look forward to many happy hours of digestion and deliberation on the Finance Bill in Public Bill Committee.
Clause 15 temporarily extends, as the hon. Member for Glasgow Central mentioned, the increased annual investment allowance of £1 million until 31 December 2021. If I may, I will give some background and then address the amendment.
The annual investment allowance, or AIA, provides businesses with an up-front incentive to invest. It allows them 100% same-year tax relief on qualifying plant and machinery investments, up to an annual limit, and simplifies tax for many taxpayers. The summer Budget of 2015 set the permanent level ofAIA at £200,000 from 1 January 2016. At Budget 2018, the level was temporarily increased to £1 million for two years, from 1 January 2019. The measure that will be enacted by this clause was announced in November 2020. The changes made by clause 15 will apply across the UK. The £1 million AIA cap covers the plant and machinery expenditures of more than 99% of all businesses.
There were a forecasted 24.9 million AIA claims in 2019-20, compared with 18 million when the cap was last at its £200,000 limit. The higher AIA cap provides businesses with more up-front support, encourages them to bring forward investment and makes tax simpler for any business investing between £200,000 and £1 million. Extending the AIA cap to £1 million supports business confidence at a time when covid-related economic shocks have severely dampened business investment. It is interesting that Chris Sanger, head of tax policy at EY, said that this measure
“will be particularly helpful for UK manufacturing at a time when, thanks to the announcement of a vaccine, business confidence is returning.”
Amendment 15, tabled by Opposition Members, seeks to change long-standing arrangements that manage the transition from one level of AIA to another. It is important to note that the current arrangements have been used by the Finance Acts of 2011, 2014 and 2019. They are familiar and well understood, and any change would create additional cost for businesses.
The change proposed would also give a benefit to a small subset of firms that have a chargeable period that straddles the date at which the AIA reduces to £200,000. However, those firms also received a benefit at the point of transition to the new £1 million level of the AIA, and therefore the amendment would not, in our judgment, be fair. It also risks encouraging some businesses to delay investment, which many would not think is in the public interest at present. I therefore urge the Committee to reject the amendment.
Overall, the clause and the measure it will constitute were warmly received by businesses at the end of last year as part of the Government’s desire to support business during the pandemic.

Jesse Norman: I thank the hon. Gentleman for his question and for his support for this important legislation. Although not related to this clause, I thank him for the  support the Labour party has given on the issue of loan charges. These are important ways to curb forms of abuse of the rules that may mean people do not pay appropriate levels of tax, so I am grateful for that support.
On the last point that the hon. Gentleman raised, I am afraid that it was an unfortunate and slightly misinformed debate in Committee of the whole House, in part because there was a suggestion that somehow clause 21 benefited only umbrella companies and should be struck out, and that the effect of striking it out would somehow mean that workers would receive agency rights by working through agencies’ payrolls. In fact, that is not correct. Clause 21 has no bearing on workers receiving rights, and it also ensures that the rules apply correctly to agencies, and indeed to a wider group, such as employees on secondment. The effect of the amendment proposed in Committee of the whole House would have been to gut the legislation, which is why the Government opposed it.

Jesse Norman: I thank the hon. Members for Glasgow Central and for Ealing North. I do not think that we need to spend too long on this. Clause 22 makes changes to the taxation of termination payments. It was published in draft and announced in a ministerial statement in July 2020. The measure has been set out in the explanatory notes and in Opposition speeches, and I will not spend too much time on them now.
The clause alters the calculation used to define the amount of a termination payment that should be taxed as post-employment notice pay. This is when an unworked notice period is not in whole months but an individual is paid monthly. Secondly, as hon. Members mentioned, the clause brings post-employment notice pay paid  to non-UK residents within the charge to UK tax. I  am grateful for the support of the Labour Opposition on that.
In terms of the amendment, I am not surprised that the hon. Member for Glasgow Central slightly stuttered over what is a formidably technical matter, but I think we can digest the point very simply. There is currently no way of calculating the payments. Amendment 1 seeks to make the calculation alternative rather than mandatory for the purposes of post-employment notice pay. I remind her and the Committee that the new calculation is more accurate for employees paid by equal monthly instalments, and that it is more straightforward for employers to administer a single mandatory calculation rather than having to choose between two alternative calculations. It is therefore just a better and more effective way of discharging the policy intent, and I urge her not to put the amendment to a vote.